Return to BSD News archive
Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!nexus.coast.net!news.kei.com!news.mathworks.com!news.ultranet.com!news.sprintlink.net!howland.reston.ans.net!Germany.EU.net!zib-berlin.de!news.tu-chemnitz.de!irz401!uriah.heep!bonnie.heep!not-for-mail
From: j@bonnie.heep.sax.de (J Wunsch)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: problems with scsi tape drive.
Date: 22 Jun 1995 13:41:55 +0200
Organization: Private U**x site, Dresden.
Lines: 42
Message-ID: <3sbku3$cv@bonnie.tcd-dresden.de>
References: <3sabkt$e1b@one.mind.net>
Reply-To: joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de
NNTP-Posting-Host: 192.109.108.139
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
Alan Laird <laird@mind.net> wrote:
>I am running 2.0-950412-SNAP on a machine with a buslogic 445c vlb
>controller. I am a little unclear as to which device I should use with
>mt and dump to make archives on this scsi dat drive. I have tried using
>
>mt /dev/st0 offline
>
>makes the tape drive light up but...
Hmm, you shouldn't even have a /dev/st0 device node. The tape driver
actually supports only raw devices, so all entries do have an `r' in
their names.
You can use the mt command in order to skip back and forth across the
tape files (though skipping back is waaaay slow at least for QIC
drives):
mt -f /dev/nrst0 fsf 3
would skip over the next three tape files on the first SCSI tape.
/dev/rst0 is the regular device node for the first SCSI tape with
rewind-on-close semantics, while /dev/nrst0 has non-rewind-on-close
semantics.
Later versions of mt(1) do also have the functionality merged into
them that used to belong to st(8) in FreeBSD <= 1.1.5.1. This allows
you to specify the tape block size and the tape density (where
supported by the hardware), and it also added the command
mt eom
which performs a fast skip to the end of recorded medium (so the drive
will be ready to append further data). Note that also the default
tape device has changed to /dev/nrst0 now (which is most rational for
99 % of all tape drives now). [Floppy tapes are still not supported
by mt(1).]
--
cheers, J"org private: joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de
http://www.sax.de/~joerg/
Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)